Often, we use Excel to summarize detail that comes from some other program or accounting system. There are essentially three ways that I am aware of to get data from another program into a destination Excel worksheet, I’ll nickname them: • Copy/Paste • Pull • Push Copy/Paste The Copy/Paste method is probably the most common. It is when you basically view or export the data to a new Excel, csv or text file, and then copy and paste the data into the destination Excel worksheet. It is easy to use and works well. However, other methods may be more efficient for recurring use workbooks. Pull You can pull the data directly from the external data source using the External Data feature of Excel. Moving to the cloud: Like the other apps in the latest Mac Office suite, Excel 2016 lets you store, sync, and edit files online, via Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage service. You can also save. Stock Connector lets you link stocks and currencies to cells in the spreadsheet and refreshes them automatically. This stock-tracking app works in Excel 2016 for Windows, Excel 2016 for Mac, Excel Online (browser), Excel for iPad, and Excel 2013 (desktop), whereas all other stock-tracking applications for Microsoft Excel work only in the desktop version. This post focuses on this feature, and the details are found below. Push You can also push the data from the system into a specific worksheet in an existing workbook. Not all applications support this method, but when they do, it will save a step. Now, let’s spend the rest of our time working through the External Data feature. External Data The External Data feature has been in Excel for a long time, and I first started using it in about 1997. This feature made a big improvement in my workflow and increased my productivity. Since then, I’ve been a huge fan of this feature! It is one of those things that is just sitting there waiting to be discovered and put to use. External Data Overview First, let’s start with what the feature does, and then we’ll move on to how to use it. External data is defined as data that exists outside of the Excel workbook, in some other place. That other place could be almost anywhere, and Excel supports pulling external data from a wide variety of sources. Examples include data stored on web pages, in text files, or in other programs. Programs that store large amounts of data are often built upon a database engine or platform. You, as the user, see the program’s user interface which is made up of menus, icons, dialog boxes, and forms. Behind the scenes however, applications often store their data in a database. It is this underlying database that Excel can often tap into with the External Data feature. This feature doesn’t pull a single value into a single cell. It retrieves a block of data, or a table, that will ultimately occupy a range of cells. The External Data feature asks you to identify the location of the data you want. Once you do, Excel retrieves the data and places it into the selected worksheet. The best part of this feature lies in the fact that the External Data range is not static.it can be refreshed. When you click the refresh button, Excel heads out to the data source and pulls back the updated data. This improves the efficiency of recurring use workbooks because you don’t need to do the whole export, import, reformat routine that is needed with the standard copy/paste method. You simply click the refresh button, and bam, the updated data just appears in your worksheet. How to Pull External Data Excel supports pulling data from a wide variety of data sources. Examples include web pages, text files such as csv files, SQL, Access, ODBC compliant sources, and more. The basic process is that you first identify the type of data source and then the location. Depending on the type of source, you’ll have appropriate options. For example, if you are pulling data from an Access database, you’ll identify the table or query, and then which columns and rows you want. For this post, I wanted to use a data source that you’ll have access to in case you want to work along. So, we’ll pull some external data from a web page. We tell Excel that we want to retrieve data from an external source by first identifying the type of source. This is done by selecting the appropriate ribbon icon from the Data tab as shown below. For this simple example, we want to get data from a web page. Our objective is to pull historical closing stock prices for Apple. So we click the From Web icon from the Data ribbon. This will reveal the next step in the process, which is to identify the web page. We’ll head over to the Yahoo Finance page, so we enter the URL into the address field, as shown below. Next, we enter the stock symbol AAPL for Apple into the web page, and click the Get Quotes button. – Maximize your tax deduction for your donations Accurately value items you donate to charity with ItsDeductible ™ (included)—no more guessing. Turbo tax 2017 need osx requirements.
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